So, me and Phil are playing a gig for impressario and onetime member of the mighty Terminal Cheesecake Simon Doling, although I’m sure he is not acting alone. I’m looking forward to the novelty of it all. I’ve never played the ‘swich before. Shit, now I’m fretting about how to ask Phil if he’s driving, because I haven’t seen a lot of him lately and it seems a bit cheeky.

|| Shy Pete Um needed a long time before he could admit to himself and his environment that he’s something like an artist. Indeed the “tape artist” spent just as much time pottering around on his cassettes in good lo-fi style until he procured a computer in 1996. From then on he was unstoppable. Pete’s art consists in storing lots of different sound segments on different sources, adding singing or shreds of conversation to them and knocking them together into songs. The gentleman from Cambridge recently brought out his debut work on Gagarin Records, the label which is the home of, among others, Brezel Göring (STEREO TOTAL) and Jaques Palminger (STUDIO BRAUN). “No Pressure” is electronic, the root is avant-gardely poppy. Some tracks are minimalistic, purely instrumental and come across as heavenly, ambient and saturnine, appearing to spring from a creative chaos, which is admittedly coherent within itself and leaves behind a feeling of unsettling harmony. Pete Um is going to be on tour in Germany for the label’s 10th anniversary. You should definitely pay the gentleman a visit! (9)